norway’s coast 119
B
ird cries seem to claw at the bright sum-
mer sky. The birds themselves—puffins,
gannets, gulls, guillemots—whirl in a tu-
mult around the bluff islands rising from
the water. We have put to sea about as far
north as you can put to sea, off the uppermost cape
of coastal Norway, high above the Arctic Circle. The
boat pitches and heaves in the rockbound channels,
and I rediscover an old truth. Seabirds are good at
flying and floating, swimming and diving, and almost
nothing else. They run across the saltwater until it
seems they’ll never get aloft, and they land like heavy
raindrops on the foamy spill from a crashing wave.
But while airborne, surveying these waters
with cocked heads, they’re the masters of this
ragged shore, these broken islands along the
northern fringe of Norway, which fits like a
skullcap over Sweden and Finland. Here, and
eastward toward Russia, Norway meets the ocean
bluntly, hills scraped bare, protruding fistlike into
the Barents Sea. No one knows the whole of the
Norwegian coast, and among its lesser known
reaches is the edge of the Varanger Peninsula,
which ends at a point farther east than St. Peters-
burg. It is a low, rimy strand studded with ancient
boulders, a world away from Bergen and bathed
in copper light among the endless archipelagoes
where the fjords run out to sea.
You could, of course, drive from Bergen to
Vardø, at the eastern point of the Varanger Pen-
insula. But a glance at a map or a set of nautical
charts makes it clear that a car is just an encum-
brance here. For the past 120 years vessels of the
famous Hurtigruten (literally, “swift route”) have
provided a lifeline linking isolated communities
to the larger world. Traveling aboard this coastal
express, miles make no difference—and at the
height of the midnight sun, hours make no dif-
ference either. You tell time by the progression
of ports: Bodø, Svolvær, Tr o m s ø .
Taken all in all, south to north, the coast of
Norway may be the most complex land edge
on the planet. In 2011 Norwegian geographers
completed a three-year project to recalculate the
length of their coastline. Using new techniques
and better maps, they added thousands of is-
lands and islets that had never been included
in the total before. In all, Norway’s measured
seashore grew by some 11,000 miles. If you ham-
mered Norway’s 63,000 miles of fjords, bays, and
island shores into a single line, it would circle the
planet two and a half times. All that in a coun-
try less than 1,100 miles from south to north.
Whether you stand on the terminal heights
above Geirangerfjorden, looking down into its
yawning blue deep, or in the bow of a small boat
besieged by seabirds, it’s hard to say whether the
sea is encroaching on the Norwegian landmass,
or the land into the body of the sea.
The water may look more continuous than the
land, but it is certainly no simpler. To travel the
Norwegian coast is to glimpse an endless dis-
continuity between land and water, the restless
inventiveness of eons of ice. Miles inland, in the
heart of Norway’s longest fjord, Sognefjorden,
the water deepens to 4,000 feet only a few hun-
dred yards from shore. Farther north, cod-dry-
ing racks and tight red boathouses look out
over water that is hundreds of feet deep. And
yet among the outermost islands in the Lofoten
By Verlyn Klinkenborg
Photographs by
Orsolya Haarberg and
Erlend Haarberg
The coast of Norway may be the most complex land edge on the planet.